Sunday, June 14, 2015

The Growing, Sprouting Seed

Shortly
after I moved to Knoxville five years ago, some friends from New York came to
visit. They opened the back door of our house and were just thrilled to
discover a back porch and a backyard. Unfortunately, I had to admit to them
that I had never yet ever stepped out onto that back porch or into that
backyard!

Jesus
did much of his public preaching and teaching in rural Galilee. So it’s no
surprise so many of his images and parables are agricultural in inspiration.
That may make obvious sense, but it also may make them hard to relate to, for
those of us whose background is completely urban. Indeed, to a non-gardener
like myself, gardening seems incredibly complex and difficult. Likewise, as a
non-farmer, I imagine farming as also quite complex and difficult. But Jesus’
parables which we just heard [Mark 4:26-32]
focus on something else – less on the human work involved and more on the mystery
of the process. The kingdom of God, Jesus says in the first parable, is as if
someone were to scatter seed on the land and watch as it sprouts and grows and
yields harvest. Meanwhile, the second
parable contrasts the final product of God’s kingdom with its seemingly modest
and maybe even inauspicious beginnings.

A
couple of decades ago, when I was new to preaching, I remember being surprised
to discover that the first of these parables is unique to the Gospel of Mark, and
is not also contained (as so much of Mark’s other material is) in either Matthew
or Luke. That seemed strange to me then and still seems so now, although all
these years later I have no more or better insight as to why that should be.
But, however obscure, however easy it may be to overlook, I think this remains
a really powerful parable. It speaks to something many modern people in
particular seem to worry about – God’s silence, his apparent absence from the
world. The point of the parable (or so it seems to me) is to acknowledge God’s
silence - but also to exclude our misinterpreting that silence as being due to
inactivity on God’s part. Silent God may well be, but absent he is not.

Both
parables are about the wonderful way the kingdom of God grows – unstoppably mysteriously
in the first parable, unstoppably successfully in the second. So, despite whatever other human narratives
it may be competing with for our attention, the narrative story-line of the
kingdom of God is unstoppable mystery and unstoppable success.

Earlier
this month, the Church celebrated the feast of the Ugandan martyrs – 22 native
African Catholics martyred in Uganda in 1886. In the liturgy for
that day, we read the words of Blessed Pope Paul VI at their canonization.
Recalling the glorious martyrs and saints of the ancient African Church of
Roman times, Paul exclaimed: “Who would have thought that in our days we should
have witnessed events as heroic and glorious?”

Who
indeed? Yet the fact of the matter is that, all over what we Westerners condescendingly
call the developing world (and, above all, in Africa), the Church is experiencing
enormous growth and profound vitality. So much so in fact that the energy of
those local Churches has begun to overflow in missionary outreach back to the older
Churches of the developed West.

Echoing
Ezekiel’s prophecy of making the withered tree bloom, Jesus’ parable illustrates
the unstoppable mystery and unstoppable success of God’s kingdom in the mustard
seed’s growth into such a great plant that all the birds of the sky can find
space for themselves in its large branches. What an amazing aspiration! What an
appropriate image for what the church is called to be in our - what we,
as Church, are called to be in our fragmented, strife-torn world!

But
in doing so, we are, of course, also challenged to bear in mind the lesson of the
parable of the growing, sprouting seed, which is – if I may deliberately
reverse the famous last words of JFK’s inaugural address – that, on earth, our
activity, our work, must truly be God’s own.

Homily for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 14, 2015.

About Me

Rev. Ronald Franco, CSP, is a member of the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle (The Paulist Fathers) and Vice-Postulator for the Canonization Cause of Paulist Founder, Isaac Hecker. He is Pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish, Knoxville, TN,